Worth Giving And Getting

A Guide To The Year's Best Fiction And Nonfiction

December 05, 1993|By Larry Kart, Editor of Tribune Books.

With the understanding that it's necessarily subjective and selective, here is a list of the best books we reviewed in 1993. And while it may go without saying, we'll say it anyway-books rank high among those gifts that keep on giving.

Fiction

The Shipping News, by E. Annie Proulx (Scribners, $20). Winner of the National Book Award and the Tribune's Heartland Prize, Proulx's tale of an endearingly oafish newspaperman's adventures in Newfoundland is at once very funny and very moving.

The Oxford Sherlock Holmes, by Arthur Conan Doyle (Oxford University Press, $99). This 9-volume, abundantly annotated boxed set is the definitive edition of the Holmes tales.

Operation Wandering Soul, by Richard Powers (Morrow, $23). In a decayed, near-future Los Angeles, a young doctor's buried memories are stirred as he treats children in a hospital emergency room.

The Night Manager, by John le Carre (Knopf, $24). Le Carre is more action-oriented than usual in this tale of one man's revenge against an international arms dealer.

The Plum in the Golden Vase, translated by David Tod Roy (Princeton University Press, $29.95). A vivid, unexpurgated translation gives us access to this 16th Century Chinese tale of rampant appetites-the world's third great novel, after "The Tale of Genji" and "Don Quixote."

Feather Crowns, by Bobbie Ann Mason (HarperCollins, $23). After giving birth to quintuplets in Kentucky at the turn of the century, a young woman undergoes a spiritual transformation.

The Life and Times of Captain N., by Douglas Glover (Knopf, $21). Re-imagining the nation's birth, Glover portrays two men and a woman whose lives are turned upside down during the Revolutionary War.

Nobody's Fool, by Richard Russo (Random House, $25). In an impoverished town in upstate New York, a man caught in the social undertow refuses to go under.

Strip Tease, by Carl Hiaasen (Knopf, $21). Blend a good-hearted stripper, her vicious ex-husband, a sleazy congressman and several other Miami-based grotesques and you've got a unique recipe for crime fiction.

Van Gogh's Room at Arles, by Stanley Elkin (Hyperion, $22.95). Three novellas from a master of skewed wit depict a world that is out of joint.

Theory of War, by Joan Brady (Knopf, $21). This historical novel is based on the life of Brady's grandfather, who at age 4 was sold as an indentured servant to a Kansas tobacco farmer shortly after the Civil War.

The Little Town Where Time Stood Still, by Bohumil Hrabal (Pantheon, $23). The gifts of a major Czech writer are evident in two off-the-wall novellas.

Nonfiction

Old Friends, by Tracy Kidder (Houghton Mifflin, $22.95). Kidder empathetically traces the patterns of life, death and friendship in a nursing home.

All Our Yesterdays, by James Oliver Robertson and Janet C. Robertson (HarperCollins, $30). A cache of diaries and documents allows two historians to trace the lives of a Connecticut family back to the 1790s.